Take a Load Off. The Robots That Fold Laundry Are Coming.

Cars can now drive themselves. Cellphones talk to us. How long will it be until the dreams of every college student and overworked parent come true — and laundry can fold itself?

At least two companies are promising to bring laundry-folding robots for the home to market by the end of 2017. Known as Laundroid and FoldiMate, both machines work by analyzing each garment they take in, figuring out its ideal folding shape and delivering a drawer-ready stack of smoothly folded clothes.

Laundroid is slightly smaller than a typical refrigerator and looks like the monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” except with drawers. The robot arms are inside.

The FoldiMate, more compact, has large clips dangling outside, making it look like a mash-up of a clothesline and a plastic oven.

A working prototype of Laundroid — backed by about $90 million in investment capital, including funds from George Roberts and Henry Kravis of the buyout firm KKR — is set to be publicly demonstrated at the end of this month in Tokyo. It will retail — only in Japan, at first — for about $16,000. Seven Dreamers, the company introducing Laundroid, aims to bring the cost down to $2,000 a unit and begin international sales by next year.

Judging from the intensity of the entrepreneurship going on in the field of laundry, most people would rather watch a video of Marie Kondo, author of the book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” folding a T-shirt so well it stands on its own than to actually do it with their own hands.

The Whirlpool Corporation, owner of the Maytag brand, is also aggressively tinkering. The company plans to introduce in January an all-in-one $1,700 washer/dryer hybrid featuring a detergent reservoir that decides on the proper portion per load, squirts it into the basin unassisted and wirelessly reorders from Amazon when empty.

“There is a high level of excitement around innovating in laundry,” said Danielle Whah, Whirlpool’s North America product director for laundry.

Neither Laundroid, which was invented in Japan, nor FoldiMate, being developed in Israel by an American company, can express existential ennui as Rosey the Jetsons’ robot did, or interface with your Roomba or your Wi-Fi-enabled Mr. Coffee to create a seamless automated washing, vacuuming and caffeinating experience. But they do seem to be a crucial advance for in-home automation, where a thinking machine lends a genuinely useful metallic hand with the chores.

“There are a few pop culture holy grails out there, the maid robot being one of them,” said Daniel H. Wilson, a researcher in robotics and an author whose books include “Where’s My Jetpack?” and the novel “Robopocalypse.”

Laundroid has an insert box and four smaller drawers. Dump in up to 30 items of clean clothing and it goes to work.

“The robot arm picks up the clothes one by one and then artificial intelligence recognizes if this is a T-shirt or pants or pajamas,” Shin Sakane, Laundroid’s inventor, said in a Skype interview from Japan.

The biggest technical challenge for both Laundroid and FoldiMate is for the machine to know what it is holding. Because clothes are shapeless in a pile, and the robot arm will grab each item sometimes by the edge, sometimes by a midpoint, “there will be no times that a garment will be picked up in the same shape,” Guy Hayazaki, a Laundroid spokesman, said.

The Laundroids will work as a team. The concept is that, using a Wi-Fi connection, the networked robot brain will connect to a server that is constantly learning best folding methods for each type of clothing by downloading data from all the other Laundroids. This hive mind promises to be able to differentiate between T-shirts, overalls and rompers, fold each according to its needs and sort them into separate piles for members of the household.

Slowly. In the first-generation Laundroid, image analysis of each garment takes up to 10 minutes; folding only a minute or two. But that adds up to nearly a full workday for a full load.

Gal Rozov, an inventor of FoldiMate, said his machine was faster. It requires users to clip each article of clothing to its front, making recognition simpler. The machine then pulls each into itself and folds.

“The whole idea is to have the experience of handing items over to a friend, who will do that hard labor for you,” Mr. Rozov said in a telephone interview from outside Tel Aviv. Using this process, it will complete a load “in minutes,” he said.

Via a crowdfunding campaign on its website, Mr. Rozov’s company has taken in about 8,000 deposits of $85, each granting the customer a 10 percent discount off the final product, which has a target price of $850, he said. The company aims to open pre-orders by the end of the year and to start deliveries at the end of 2018.

Both Mr. Rozov and Mr. Sakane, working on opposite sides of the globe, were inspired by their spouses.

“My wife claims I’m one of the worst laundry folders in the world, and she’s right,” Mr. Rozov said. “I hate it. We have three kids, and laundry folding is tedious, and I wanted some way to help out.”

Mr. Sakane received a Ph.D. in chemistry and biochemistry from the University of Delaware in 2000 and returned to his native Japan to work for his father’s company, Industrial Summit Technology, which is known for selling a component that improves the efficiency of laser printers. Mr. Sakane wanted to work on fully realized consumer products, along the lines of his business heroes: Steve Jobs of Apple and Konosuke Matsushita, a founder of Panasonic.

He formed his own company, Seven Dreamers, which already has two inventions on the market: One, called Nastent, is a tube that slides up the nose to stop snoring (not yet for sale in the United States); the other is a carbon-fiber golf shaft that is meant to decrease drag.

Mr. Kravis and Mr. Roberts of KKR are fans of the shaft, leading to their interest in Laundroid. A spokeswoman for KKR said they had invested their own money, not the company’s. Other investors include Panasonic and the Japanese homebuilder Daiwa.

Mr. Sakane said he was casting about for a business idea more than a decade ago when he asked his wife, “Is there anything in your mind which is not available anywhere in the world, something to use at home and something that you really, really want to have?

“And she said, ‘Of course! It’s a laundry-folding robot!’ And then I thought ‘Yes, this is it!’”

So, has Mr. Sakane brought a Laundroid into his own home yet?

“Not yet,” he said. “My wife keeps asking me when.”

While the modern laundry room is generally built to contain a separate washer and dryer, Whirlpool’s market research has found that many consumers will be interested in buying two washer/dryer hybrids and standing them side by side to increase capacity and to reduce time spent on the chore, Ms. Whah said.

Last year, about 17 million washers and dryers were sold in the United States, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers. Mr. Sakane projected that Laundroid sales could reach 20 million units a year worldwide.

Perhaps. But as Ms. Whah noted, consumers still consider the core benefit of laundry to be “getting your clothes clean in the washer and dry in the dryer.”

Annalee Newitz, a technology writer, wondered in a phone interview if Laundroid would eventually become like a bread machine: an oft-gifted, rarely used appliance.

Hugh Howey, the science fiction writer, said in an email: “What I hope to see is a future where all our hours are filled not with mandatory drudgery needed to sustain our finances, but freely chosen tasks which sustain our souls.”

It’s an attractive future. With that in mind, I’d add something to the already long product name for one of these new laundry devices: Whirlpool Smart All-in-One Washer and Dryer Combo … and Massage Chair.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: Take a Load Off. The Robots That Fold Laundry Are Coming.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe